A journey to find purpose and to create a meaningful life

Fish Don’t Know They Are in Water

Each day I am learning many new things. I promised I will try and leave some thoughts here on the blog, even when the classwork seems to already be building up 🙂 My wise sister reminds me there is always more studying to do, so you have to stop somewhere.

Today in class, one of my professors started out by saying, “Fish don’t know they are in water.” Meaning that it’s easy to not understand what is around you, because it’s all you know. It is not until you take a fish out of water that he can compare the experience to something else.

When I moved to Kenya in 2014, it was the first time I realized I was in water. It was the first time I could compare my American life to a different way in which people lived. I learned much more about being an American while living abroad than I ever did while living in the U.S. I was able to compare different ways of living and question how I was living before.

We don’t know we are in water, and as a consequence we don’t understand our surroundings. It takes leaving the water to be able to know where we were.